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US's First Internet Votes To Be Cast This Friday
longacre writes "If you thought online voting in America was a distant pipe dream (nightmare?), think again: the nation's first Internet-based voting system goes online this Friday, just days after the release of the Damning Report On Sequoia E-Voting Machine Security we discussed yesterday. In the first real world run of the Okaloosa Distance Ballot Piloting (ODBP) test program, election officials from Okaloosa County, Florida have set up kiosks in Germany, the UK and Japan where 600-700 absentee voters — mostly military personnel — are expected to cast ballots. Security experts still have many questions, of course, particularly on the potential for interception of voting data while it travels across oceans (via 'secure VPN'), the security of the kiosks ('hardened laptops' with no hard drives and other sensitive components disabled) and the security of the three data centers (one of which is itself housed overseas, in Barcelona, Spain), not to mention the fact that Florida doesn't exactly have a stellar record when it comes to vote counting. Florida's Dept. of State also has a fairly detailed outline of ODBP's components and processes [PDF]."
Vote!
It's been two election cycles, everyone still thinks Florida is the only state with voting problems. Get over it.
... they'll claim it's a crack even if they were legit. (Does the system accept write-ins?)
Now if they get 500+ votes for Mitnick...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How can internet voting be both guaranteed "secret" - as in "can't tie the user to the choice of candidate", and at the same time ensure that individuals (never mind bots) aren't casting more than one vote?
How do we know that Internet voting hasn't already occurred, if we can't see Diebold's source code?
Shit, cross site scripting! I voted for a pop-up!
Anyone else think this is the worst idea yet?
Don't screw it up again, you guys!!
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
I can see the headlines now:
"Postback problems cause some voters to vote hundreds of times for Obama"
or
"Postback problems cause some voters to vote hundreds of times for McCain"
(whatever your political leanings are)
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
electronic voting is not bad because of either real or imagined security issues. That is totally irrelevant.
Electronic voting is bad because the procedure can not be verified by any layman. That should be the first requirement for any voting procedure.
Paper ballot procedures are easy to verify and anybody can do it. Simply keep an eye on the ballot box from the initial sealing of the box until the actual voting.
With electronic voting that is not possible. A paper trail comes close, but voters can screw that up by not putting there tag in the box, or any other random piece of paper in its place.
Bottom line: voting is about TRUST in the procedure first, the actual results second.
MAN ON FIVE, Cook County, Monday -- The McCain campaign is looking at an Electoral College strategy heading into the final two weeks that has virtually no room for error.
"Democrat voting fraud is famous since Tammany Hall," says Republican strategist Karl Rove. "So we'll win without votes."
Voting machines have been remotely reset and the counts adjusted. "Diebold have come to the party big time." Touch screen machines for West Virginia early voting offer voters "McCAIN" or "REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN LATER."
The rolls will be thoroughly checked for voter fraud. "If the typeface or font size is different on their driver's licence, Social Security or the voter roll, that's obvious blatant fraud. A typical Liberal knife to the heart of democracy."
The party will check for dead voters as well. "We're making the safe assumption that all registered Democrats are dead. If they're not, we'll correct that." Governor Palin has long dealt with Democrat moose in Alaska. "You betcha!"
All residents of properties whose mortgages were underwritten by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac will be assumed to have voted Republican. "We own the houses, of course we own the votes. It's nonsense to say otherwise."
Finally, under USA-PATRIOT, Obama supporters will be deemed associates of associates of terrorists. The offence will carry a penalty of one day's imprisonment: November 4th.
Mr Rove is confident in the future of our democracy. "One man, one vote. That man being me."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
what could possibly go wrong?
sigh.
And the red states have it at the last minute folks! Sure they where all blue but hey, you folks spoke!
Uncle Mantis
... than the alternative
How long before some one hacks them to write in Rick Astley?
Skilled in differentiating ravens from a writing desks.
If banks can securely (with ~ 99.999% security) transfer thousands of dollars online, then the technology exists to securely permit voting online.
Anything that speeds up voting encourages greater participation. Our present voting system originated in the dark ages. The fastest communication was by horse, it took several days for a horse to get from one side of the USA to the other, or about 2 months by boat to get from UK to Australia.
If the internet had existed in the time of the founding fathers, I feel sure they would have used it to give the people greater oversight of the legislative process.
[Insert facepalm ascii art here.]
So I guess now it's a tube dream.
Or possibly a series of tube dreams.
1. Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
2. This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls.
3. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
I am officially gone from
How does the state rationalize the cost of a Kiosk for 5 or 6 hundred voters? Part of automation is recognizing when it is not cost effective (or sensical) to install an automated solution.
Someone in Florida has the techno-madness.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
...to ODBP via ODBC?
It looks like Cowboy Neal/Hanging Chad ticket will wind up with 27 electoral votes after taking 88% of 35 million votes cast in Florida. Any other states want to endorse his candidacy by putting their elections online?
... and IP address?
US's First Internet Votes To Be Cast This Friday...
George W. Bush to be declared winner Saturday.
Absentee ballots via the US mail work just fine... This is just smoke an mirrors to make people think there has been progress in fixing the American balloting system..
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
List votes = machine.getVotes();
for (Vote vote : votes) {
vote.setSelection(Candidate.MCCAIN);
}
machine.setPaperTrail(null);
Personally, I'd be far more concerned with ID fraud than attacks on the encryption scheme. How do they determine who's using the 'hardened laptop'?
The government can't save you.
Just what we need botnets of voters. :-)
I agree it's possible to separate a user's choice from their identity and still provide an audit trail, but wouldn't any encryption scheme require that the 'user' provide some sort of identity - be it a public key, id #, etc.? Even if that identity was in no way tied to a particular vote, it is still considered a civil rights violation in many states to require id cards/drivers license/etc. In my state, you give your name, which is crossed out in a big book- and efforts to do otherwise have been called "racist" and "voter intimidation". In other words, you get to log in by providing any username and no password. Without reliably establishing identity, you can't verify that a person hasn't voted twice.
we have had paper trail voting every year the last hundred years. i costs very little, all votes are counted by 02.00 AM, with the last voter leaving the voting booths around 18. A second count is then done (by different people) which is done by lunchtime the next day.
all papers are stored forever in a deep mountain storage facility. we have all our votes stored over the last 100 years. if you would like to go count, say 1974's votes, just go ahead.
~80% of our population goes voting. (US today is 40% i believe)
i live in sweden.
I vote IPv6! err, wait..
But going from paper straight to internet is leaping way too far.
Don't forget that after one can vote from home, or better yet, cellphone, votes can be sold MUCH easier. I don't think blackmail is out of question either.
Also, once daddy has made up his mind who the family is voting for, he can observe his family-members vote for the 'right' candidate.
It is still necessary to go to give your vote in a voting booth and for the sake of democracy, I suggest that voting should remain as easy and uncomplicated as it is. This is one of the only things I pride myself on being conservative of.
Why are voting early?
Why are we voting electronically?
Fucking print a form, hand it to people, and have them mark their selections. Later, count them (in parallel).
Without thinking too deeply about it, it seems like even internet voting could make use of paper ballots. The thing to remember is that the best way we've come up with to design an in-person voting machine is to use the computer to make it easy and clear which candidate the user is voting for. But print a paper ballot with those (and just those) selections so that the user can visually verify that the ballot matches their choices with no ambiguity.
So to do the same with internet voting would require a printer, a camera and at a minimum a clock for each 'internet voting machine.' The user fills out the electronic ballot and then remote end prints the paper ballot in full view of the camera with a clock also in frame with the ballot so that the user can verify the paper ballot reflects their choices. If all is good, the user clicks 'submit' and watches the paper ballot go into the ballot box, if he clicks 'cancel' it goes into the trash and the user goes back to filling out the ballot.
Now the reason for the clock being on camera too is to raise the bar for replay and impersonation attacks. It certainly isn't fool-proof, but no system of anonymous voting has ever been fool-proof. The goal is simply to make voting fraud en-masse prohibitively expensive. We will always have onsie-twosie fraud, but in the big picture that kind of fraud doesn't usually matter.
Florida! Really, you're going to start with the state that has the highest percentage of Electile Dysfunction and try to prove that it works. Does it come with a blue pill?
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Now CNN is reporting that Al-Quaeda is attempting to "somehow" mess with the US elections. Finally, a reason to turn people away from the polls and enforce strict laws in swing states.
The US elections are a joke, your leader is a fascist dictator.
Ace
This isn't the frist election in the us to be on the net
the first one was in 2000 in the arizona primary
http://people.reed.edu/~gronkep/webofpolitics/projects/onlinevoting/arizona.html
All I can say is,I hope someone hacks the system and makes Ron Paul win.
All your votes are belong to us. Make your time...
--I like turtles...
I would point out that at least one of the systems mentioned on that page has been defeated by Andrew Appel (see here) the author of the top-linked Sequoia study.
And, ultimately, as much fun as these systems are they often ignore the far more real problem of vote observation and intimidation. This isn't an indictment of the algorithms per-se but the reason that we have a closed voting booth is that voting in the open lends itself to voter indimidation (i.e. show me you vote the right way or I'll fire/kill/pay you) which has been a real problem in the U.S. Granted this problem also exists with absentee ballots and "everyone vote absentee" methods like Oregon's Vote By Mail, but in the rush to develop auditable systems this often gets ignored.
Additionally, at least the end-to-end systems that I have viewed suffer from the problem of auditability, no means to confirm the end message with the local understanding, and a problem that the connected server can itself be compromised meaning that wired in votes can be miscounted with no means to audit them.
Anything that speeds up voting encourages greater participation.
How long does it take the average voter to cast his or her vote, in your guesstimate? How long has it taken you? From my vague memory, it takes me transportation [2 x 2km by bike] plus five to ten minutes. If you mean to talk about tallying speeds, you're saying that some people go "I could vote, but because I'm going to have the result in $n days instead of... still getting the result in $n days, I'm not going to".
I don't know much about voter registration in the US [in Denmark, you get a card mailed to you that you hand in at the voting hall in exchange for an empty ballot], but I suspect that this is the real culprit. I remember John Taylor Gatto (.com) say in one of his talks that he sent some of his students (\in K-12) out on the streets handing out voter registration forms. People came running and screaming for them.
I think the danish system works very well. Voter turnout is still too low in my opinion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout says it's 87%), but at least the bar is fairly low; if people abstain due to apathy or a busy schedule, that's not really something you can fix by forcing them to turn up [and cast a blank vote].
But I agree with your view; actually, an overarching one: making voting easier makes more people do it.
If the internet had existed in the time of the founding fathers, I feel sure they would have used it to give the people greater oversight of the legislative process.
s/legislative process/all of government/. All power must be kept in check.
Not any different than mail in ballots or provisional ballots, IE the container has to be identifiable all the way to a "authorized person" where the outer layer is stripped away (hopefully, since it is un-verifiable to the voter) then counted. At least with the digital layers it is trusting a machine (hopefully, and verified by a qualified group, since it is un-verifiable to the voter).
which is the other option for absentee voting.
Truly... seriously...
If these elections are truly "secure", they shouldn't mind hackers (of course they will) trying to hack it. The fact that we haven't had someone say "hey, everyone we're going to have an election - just try to screw it up!" to test the procedure tells me people are still living under the illusion that this will be 100% secure.
Sure, every vote is important, but I think a relatively small number of evotes should be used to show that evoting can be tampered with.
CowboyNeal in '08! I think he should get every evote... in fact even more than that!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
McCain makes Obama cry.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
The robot ballot is open....and the robot vote is in. Nixon wins!!!
This is what we get when the Cray is made available to the public at a low, low price.
Jenna Jameson
Welcome to the Glorious Union of Soviet Capitalist Republics!
I got a write-in, Jimmy, who the hell is HAL-2000?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If history is any guide, GWB will be declared winner on Thursday.
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